Cassidy

Meaning of Cassidy

Cassidy, born of the Irish surname Ó Caiside—‘descendant of Caiside,’ a by-name traditionally glossed as “curly-haired” and, by some lexical sleight of hand, “clever”—travels across the Atlantic like a swift syllabic swallow, alighting in American playgrounds with the gently lilting pronunciation KAS-i-dee. In the wake of 1970s pop-culture luminaries David and Shaun Cassidy, the appellation shed its purely patronymic cloak and, with a touch of irony worthy of Horace’s ars poetica, settled most comfortably upon baby girls: it vaulted from a scarcely noted rank in the late 1960s to a dazzling No. 99 by 1999, and though it now sails in the mid-400s, it remains a sturdy craft in the onomastic fleet. The name’s dual mystique—equal parts emerald-isle romance and frontier swagger, thanks to the folkloric shadow of Butch Cassidy—gives it a resilient vitality: one can almost hear a fiddle’s jig blending with a mariachi trumpet as the child called Cassidy toddles onto the global stage, a small ambassador of Celtic cadence warmed by Latin sunlight.

Pronunciation

Irish

• Pronunced as KAH-si-dee (/ˈkæsiði/)

American English

• Pronunced as KAS-i-dee (/ˈkæsədi/)

• Callie
• Cassie
• Cadence